Thursday, July 7, 2011

It's rare to see a Fail this total

(Full Disclosure: I am typing this on a Toshiba Satellite. Last year, with my third Dell laptop falling apart, I decided to give Toshiba a try. No complaints, except that I wish the company would stop trying to sell me it's backup service, and that it's touchpad wasn't so damned sensitive. I also decided to ditch Dell because my fingers burn the letters right off the keyboard after about 18 months- something about the oddly acidic qualities of my fingertips. Very strange. But I digress...)

Ok, at first glance it appears that the entire point of this stupid, offensive assault on our senses is to convince us to pay a little (a lot) more for our Toshiba Laptops by purchasing an optional piece of equipment called an "Impact-Smart Hard Drive?"

So the potential customer is uncertain of the utility of this Not Standard Option- until he imagines a truly bizarre, Not Really Possible In Real Life series of events involving power outages, spoiled milk turning people into zombies, and an unnecessarily graphic, ugly moment of violence. His vivid imagination- not a sales pitch, not a practical example of what could happen if one's laptop gets damaged (loss of data- gee, I came up with that all by myself)-- is what convinces him.

So the actual message of this commercial is- Toshiba offers something called an Impact-Smart Hard Drive. It costs extra, and if you want it, it will delay shipping of your new laptop. And Toshiba can't think of a plausible reason why you'd need it anyway. So unless you are an idiot who thinks that drinking sour milk turns people into zombies, you are perfectly safe in skipping the option and getting your laptop at a lower cost, faster.

On the other hand, if you don't have a lot of money and don't Gotta Get a Dell, this company makes a pretty nice laptop to go along with their stupid, self-defeating commercials.

Actually the "customer" in this commercial is suppose to be the CEO of Toshiba, hence why he wants to delay the release of the product till they include the impact smart hard drive. Though I full well agree that instead of presenting a logical reason to have such a drive (data-loss due to damage, hard drive failure to do damage, ect) they present a totally illogical scenario, though he is a CEO after all. They also do the same thing for their new TV's with built in Wi-Fi. It's a simple problem with an even simpler solution. If you can't think of a legitimate reason why you need that feature than, talk to your fucking R&D department I'm pretty sure they could give you a better reason for an ISH than ZOMBIES!

Instead of spending the extra money on the impact smart hard drive, why not just upgrade to a solid state hard drive? There are no moving parts and drive heads to crash if you drop your laptop! The prices on SSD's are dropping every month.